Category: DIY-palooza

My sweet boyfriend Greg (if you are 54 years old do you still get to use the word “boyfriend”?) spent many hours recently, building me a piece of furniture that I had been hoping to find at auction for a long time, but just could never get my hands on. It is a primitive-style farmhouse step-back cabinet: two-door enclosed base, with a three-shelf open hutch on top.

Greg hasn’t really built any furniture before, but because we had started to do some small refinishing projects for our booth pieces, we had acquired a radial arm saw and then a table saw. So one day he went to the garage and started building a couple of miniature “barn gates” made of cedar. When he first showed them to me, we talked about aging them and styling as decorative wall pieces to be sold in our antique booth. Then he started talking about maybe building a cabinet around them, and at that point I showed him the inspiration photo below for what I thought it could become.

Photo found via Google Images

And so, without any plans and just working out of his head with his background in large-scale construction (and NOT – as he likes to claim – in finely detailed finishing work)… he built this:

I mean, it’s perfect. So perfect I want to cry. It’s exactly what I was looking for, only better because it’s handmade. The cabinet stands about six feet tall and four feet wide. It’s made primarily out of rough-cut cedar fence pickets and pine two-by’s. The beautiful, naturally aged top on the base is reclaimed barn board.

The hutch is made of more cedar pickets, pine one- and two-by’s, and pine shelving.

In finishing, we experimented with a wood-staining technique where you first paint the wood with black tea, and then vinegar steeped with steel wool to draw out an aged, silvery color. However, for reasons unknown, on this project the aged color was decidedly reddish/brownish/rustish. Here it is part-way through the staining process.

Although it didn’t turn to the silvery color I was anticipating, it allowed me to paint the entire piece white with a dark, aged appearance underneath so that if I chose to manually distress it, the “aged” wood would show through.

Once the aging step was completed, I painted the entire thing in Glidden Premium interior paint in Nano White. It took an entire gallon, two coats overall and in some places, three. I left the barnwood unpainted. Greg then attached the top to the base and we moved the whole thing into place.

I admit, I stayed up until about 3 a.m. fussing and styling with some of my favorite cottage pieces, many of which have been in hiding just waiting for this very piece of furniture.

I can’t even begin to express how impressed and touched I am that this is what he chose to build, and that he seems to love it as much as I do. I’m pretty impressed with him, and I hope he is too!

Hey remember that post where I told you that I never paid more than ten dollars for a table at an auction, except for the time that I did? Well this is that table – and again, although I don’t have a before photo, you can imagine this being a plain honey-pine side table with details that could either be interpreted as ranch/western… or ship’s wheel/nautical, which is what I chose. Here’s what I did with the little pine table, as a gift for my daughter who loves all things beachy and nautical.

Seahorse and oceanic graphics applied using an inkjet transfer method. The quotation reads: “The Sea, once it casts its spell, holds one in its net of wonder forever. – Jacques Cousteau”

Nautical rope applied around the edge.

All ready for an umbrella drink!

I hand-painted a directional “beach” sign to go with this piece that also featured a bit of rope and some shells. Shortly after she received these items, my daughter relocated to Florida for six months to take part in the Disney College Program, where she worked at the Magic Kingdom, visited the beach many times, and even learned to surf. I’m pretty certain she’ll be going back some day.

Recently at work our maintenance team gifted me with a small empty wooden cable or wire spool. (Do they know me or what!?)

I had seen so many examples of the larger spools being repurposed into tables, and I knew there must be a use for this size too. A quick review of Pinterest yielded several good ideas, but my favorite was the creation of a counterop coffee station. It seemed simple enough, and after some planning I decided my coffee station needed to meet the following criteria:

Be as compact as possible to save countertop space.

Spin for easy access to all the cups.

Decoratively corral supplies on top so they would not “fly off” while spinning.

Have a “vintage cottage kitchen” look.

Here are the steps I used to complete my coffee station!

I removed the two full-length bolts that held the cardboard center tube in place, and retained those for a future project. I pulled the tube loose easily from the top and bottom wooden pieces.

Using spray adhesive, I wrapped the tube in a carefully measured and cut piece of textured wallpaper that I had on hand.

You could also paint the center tube, cover it in Contact paper, wrap it in nautical-style rope, or even wrap it in a mosaic tile sheet finished with grout – whatever suits the look you’re going for. I trimmed the excess off the ends so the paper was flush with the cardboard tube.

I sanded both sides of each of the wood pieces, and painted both pieces top and bottom with three coats of leftover white paint.

I used my E-6000 glue to attach a spinning spice rack to the underside of the bottom piece of wood. Mine was already white – you might have to paint yours depending on what color you need it to be.

I attached white screw-in cup hooks to the underside of the wooden top, using my trusty “eyeball-it” method and a stand-in stunt mug to figure out the spacing of the hooks.

The key here is to make sure the cups don’t touch or clink together, so be sure to use your largest cup as your stunt mug. I set my hooks far enough in so the cups would hang under the top edge, as this would save space. I also had to experiment with a variety of hook sizes so that the hook would fit my cup handles but not drop the cup so far down that it touched the wood base. (I now have a lifetime supply of cup hooks of varying sizes and finishes that were used in testing!)

The top also needed to corral supplies such as sugar and creamer packets. For this purpose I attached a decorative basket to the flat surface of the top, using small dots of hot glue around the perimeter of the basket bottom. This could also be a small wooden box painted to match, a small bin, or any small container that fits the surface and your design theme.

With the individual sections now complete, I used my E-6000 glue to re-attach the center tube to the wooden top and bottom sections. I used books as weights to hold everything solidly in place as it dried.

Once it was dry, I simply stocked my coffee station with mugs, coffee, and other supplies. It sits neatly under the kitchen cabinetry and keeps everything within easy reach.

This piece could also be used for tea or hot cocoa supplies – customize for your beverage of choice!

I’ve never been shy about grabbing something useful off the curb… and neither has Greg. The two of us make a rather unbeatable team at this, and we seem to recognize the value in the same types of things. Case in point: a nice piece of furniture, like this low-slung coffee table that we picked last Fall. Well-made, a handy pull-out drawer, and solid if a bit out-dated.

Perfect for an upcycle project! My vision for this piece was based on its height – it stood only about 14 inches off the floor, on beautiful curvy legs, and had a solid expanse of top. I envisioned it as a piece for a kids’ room, and I thought, “It’ll make a great play surface, but they’re going to write all over it.” And that’s when it hit me!

Yep, I masked off that center section of the top, painted the table base with a light blue hue called “Little Whale” from the Tones for Tots line of Fusion Mineral Paint, and then painted the center section with chalkboard paint. I lightly distressed the blue base, and sealed it with satin-finish poly sealer. It made the perfect activity table, especially if those activities revolved around chalk!

We’ve had a few successes with repurposing projects – cast-off items we purchased and then transformed into something different and useful. (Remember our Beachy Federalist coat rack?) By far our mutual favorite is what we simply call our bar cart, which started life as one section of a barrister bookcase.

We found the section at Goodwill – normally it would sit horizontally and be stacked on top of other identical sections – and quickly re-envisioned it as a bar cart. So we got to work designing, and came up with the general idea that it would sit vertically, with a hinged shelf that would pop up, and shelving inside for bar supplies, glassware, and liquor bottles. Engineering these elements was interesting… Greg handled the problem-solving in this phase, based on my design.

We also opted for caster wheels on the bottom, and envisioned a sort of industrial color scheme with a light green painted base and a faux copper spray-painted top.

We put the finished cabinet in our booth at The Picker Knows, and to our delight it sold within a week. After this project, we’re pretty well convinced that most any cabinet could be repurposed into a home bar!